The extraordinary hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton

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The speech on internet freedom by Secretary of State Clinton overnight Australian time contains some thoughtful observations about the connection between online communication, politics and freedom. It’s also a display of the most remarkable hypocrisy from the Government at the centre of attempts to destroy Wikileaks.

Clinton, or her State Department staffers, are smart enough to understand the essential sterility of the debate over the role of social media in recent uprisings in the Middle East. This is a debate in which the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov have become ever shriller (and ever more reliant on counter-factuals) in attempting to downplay the role of online media in events on the ground in countries like Egypt, even as protesters themselves hailed the importance of Facebook and Twitter in enabling them to spread information about demonstrations.

There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point. Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

Clinton repeatedly refers to “connection technologies”, emphasising that it is what people do when they connect that it important, not the technologies that enables the connection. Calling the internet the “public space of the 21st century”, Clinton says

The goal is not to tell people how to use the internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square. The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the internet.

Incidentally, the best account I’ve seen of how connectivity facilitates direct political action in dictatorships is from US sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who in a recent, excellent piece on the social media/Middle East revolution debate discusses, inter alia, how “social media is best at solving a societal-level prisoner’s dilemma in which there is lack of knowledge about the depth and breadth of the dissent due to censorship and repression and a collective-action barrier due to suppression of political organization.”

Clinton of course is unable to get away without addressing Wikileaks. But discussion of government transparency in the Wikileaks context is, for Clinton, “a false debate. Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase.” That is, WIkileaks isn’t really about the internet, but about a crime. Clinton then goes on to explain that the idea of complete government transparency is unworkable, and that diplomats do a great deal of good work that couldn’t go ahead without secrecy. All of which we’ve heard before, naturally.

The U.S. Government’s ability to protect America, to secure the liberties of our people, and to support the rights and freedoms of others around the world depends on maintaining a balance between what’s public and what should and must remain out of the public domain. The scale should and will always be tipped in favor of openness, but tipping the scale over completely serves no one’s interests

Clinton goes on to make a couple of further points that are of relevance to Wikileaks. She concludes her Wikileaks-specific coments by saying:

There were reports in the days following these leaks that the United States Government intervened to coerce private companies to deny service to WikiLeaks. That is not the case. Now, some politicians and pundits publicly called for companies to disassociate from WikiLeaks, while others criticized them for doing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a line between expressing views and coercing conduct. Business decisions that private companies may have taken to enforce their own values or policies regarding WikiLeaks were not at the direction of the Obama Administration.

Secretary Clinton also nominates China, Burma, Cuba, Vietnam and Syria as examples where online free speech is restricted and those seeking to express themselves are suppressed – an approach she calls “unsustainable”. She goes on to laud the United States’s own approach to freedom of speech, declaring it is the only workable approach online. “The United States does restrict certain kinds of speech in accordance with the rule of law and our international obligations. We have rules about libel and slander, defamation, and speech that incites imminent violence. But we enforce these rules transparently, and citizens have the right to appeal how they are applied. And we don’t restrict speech even if the majority of people find it offensive.”

These comments constitute a remarkable series of lies and hypocrisies.

The US Government has regularly harassed Wikileaks associate and internet activist and Tor founder Jacob Applebaum, subjecting him to extensive and, in the end, almost comical seaches of his electronic equipment whenever he returns to the United States. Needless to say, this rather undermines Clinton’s chiding of other governments for intimidating bloggers. Supporters of the soldier detained and charged in relation to the original leaking of the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, Bradley Manning, have been harassed by US Marines and prevented from visiting him, while the Defense Department has been caught out misrepresenting the unusually harsh conditions in which Manning is being held.

In further contrast to Clinton’s emphasis on “enforcing the rules transparently”, the US Government’s legal campaign against Wikileaks has been secret from the outset. Despite military officials admitting they’re unable to link Julian Assange to anything with which he could be charged, a secret grand jury process in Virginia continues against Wikileaks, aided by a secret Department of Justice subpoena. This was only revealed when Twitter took the commendable step of applying for confidentiality to be removed from a DoJ demand for an extraordinary range of information, including on Applebaum’s Twitter account and everyone who is a Twitter follower of Wikileaks. Clinton’s speech was of course on the same day the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation appeared in Federal Court to seek the unsealing of court records relating to the subpoena.
Oh and incidentally it was the Department of Justice that recommended the law firm Hunton and Williams to Bank of America in order for it to prepare an attack on Wikileaks. We know how that ended.

In addition to the Department of Justice attempt to conjure up a charge against Julian Assange, the FBI has undertaken an aggressive investigation of online group Anonymous in relation to its “Operation Payback” attacks on Visa, Mastercard and PayPal after their suspension of payments to Wikileaks, but there has been no action, indeed apparently no investigation, of the DDOS attacks undertaken on Wikileaks itself, from within the United States, for which an individual has claimed responsibility. Nor has there been any apparent law enforcement action in response to the plan developed by HB Gary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies for Hunton and Williams to attack Wikileaks and Salon’s Glenn Greenwald.

Clinton’s attempt to dissociate the Obama Administration from corporate decisions about Wikileaks is sophistry of the highest order. It is true that PayPal was caught out trying to blame the State Department for its decision to suspend payments to Wikileaks, when the State Department had not said what was attributed to them by PayPal. But a figure closely allied with the Obama Administration, Joe Lieberman – Clinton campaigned for him when he defected from the Democrats – successfully demanded Amazon sever ties with Wikileaks. Moreover, Vice-President Biden has described Assange as a “high-tech terrorist” – terminology that surely makes it very difficult for US corporations to have any connection with Wikileaks.

Clinton’s comments about the dangers of transparency in diplomacy – which forms the guts of her straw-man comments on Wikileaks – have already been refuted by her Cabinet colleague Robert Gates, who stated in December that Wikileaks would not do any “serious damage” to US foreign policy, that its effect was merely to embarrass, and that the world would – contrary to Clinton’s claims – continue to talk to the United States’s diplomats. Director of national intelligence James Clapper also recently backed off an earlier assessment that Wikileaks would inflict any harm on the US.

Secretary Clinton’s emphasis in her comments about Wikileaks on how it started with theft, and her complete refusal to address issues around the First Amendment and the Administration’s intention – if it can – to prosecute a publisher, form part of a continuing pattern of delegitimsation of Wikileaks, which includes unsubstantiated claims that Wikileaks trawled peer-to-peer sites to steal documents.

The gap between any government’s rhetoric and its actual practices is always substantial. And yes, Wikileaks was always a difficult issue for Clinton given her previous staunch support for internet freedom, which she doubtless never conceived could come to be a problem for the United States. But her latest speech, with its hypocrisy, sophistry and barefaced lies, widens the gap between rhetoric and reality even further.

I’m not denying that much of the media, particularly in the US, has been appalling in relation to Wikileaks and Assange, and even the positive coverage in Australia has been shallow and sensationalist (anyone see the Four Corners report on Assange and Bradley Manning the other night? It was well done, but mostly old news). But The Age loves Assange – he’s feeding them great stories and reinvigorating their business model, giving them new relevance. This old/new media dichotomy is a bit simplistic in this instance.

And let’s be honest, Assange himself, with his crop of white hair, geekie good looks, air of conviction and intense, articulate style, is just what the media loves. Which isn’t all good, of course, because the story becomes the put-upon male rock-star-messiah and not the actual content of the leaks.

I could hardly believe my ears when listening to Hillary Clinton, immediately recognising the hypocrisy in what she was saying. I think that my heart saw the hypocrisy before my head did. It was just another example of the extent to which we are accustomed in daily life to let people get away with wrong doing. We are so used to people lying – and calling it diplomacy – that it has become a framework of our lives. It is a “writ large” hypocrisy that is as influential as say, the hypocrisy of our countries spending billions on arms when we have people on a basis wage who cannot afford housing.

if you look at every first world leading power of say,the past 400 years, being hypocritical goes with the territory i.e you have to be ‘playing’ one half of the world off against the other half, if you want to maintain your economic & military power…sad but true.

I wonder if the internet age will herald a new world power sharing base, via the net’s transparency…Wkileaks has aleady shoewn how the power dynamic can be drastically overnight by the ‘sharing’ of what was formerly clandestine, hypoctirical planning.

In my view, Military Industrial Complex profits and all the dirty tricks like HBGary have been shown to be up to including high end law firms and the US Banking sector. The War Economy delusion could also be interpreted as a failing of the US mental health system in spotting sociopaths in power maybe.

What is of big concern to me is our own govt’s approach to sucking up to the US regime when it is plainly obvious what the US admin is say and what it does are two completely different stories.

New legislation in the US Congress targets WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for espionage prosecution. Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, introduced the Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination, or SHIELD, Act. The bill would clarify US law by saying it is an act of espionage to publish the protected names of American intelligence sources who collaborate with the US military or intelligence community

Kind of ironic considering the outing of Valerie Plame by the Government itself. Libby the Leaker was originally jailed, but later pardoned by Bush who thought 30 months for endangering the life of a intelligence operative was excessive.

My law professor summed it up nicely when he said, “the Freedom of Information Act protects the right to access information, unless your name is Wikileaks”.

I mean when the US media allow people to get on air and spread thoughts like “Assange should be tried for treason and executed”, it really makes you wonder where the media’s loyalties lie. Hardly any of the content was reported on but the main story was the government’s outrage, and then soon after, Assange’s under-age sex case. Opportunity missed by a well oiled political machine and the information bottom feeders that call themselves journalists.

Just hearing that Hillary Clinton had given a speech about internet freedom prompted me to try to find the wikileaks released cable in which as Secretary of State she prompted US staff try to try to obtain the credit card details of foreign diplomats an the UN.

Yeah hypocrisy and Hillary Clinton.

But interestingly I find the wikileaks archive no longer (technical probs, try again later sort of message) working so the particular cable seems not so easy to put my finger on.

Can others find it?

I’m pretty sure I’ve got a torrent file of all the released downloads somewhere, but when Hillary Clinton starts expounding on internet freedom I’d like her track record to be available for balancing her public versus non-public representations.

Also the US state department is sponsoring various tools to help activists fight a repressive government – an example is ‘haystack’ , which I think is a bit like tor – however this is one they like. Only problem is it isn’t particulary secure.

6. The media has colluded with Government and provided a completely unbalanced view of WikiLeaks and Assange. We know this because the conclusions they present are hard to arrive at from the facts and yet they stay on script flawlessly, fabrications need to be organised to stay this consistant. The truth does not. With media cross-ownership and consolidation at a level where only a very few media moguls set the tone, very little honest reporting is presented. The symbiotic Media Mogul / Government relationship ensures they are both protected. It is my perception that WikiLeaks largely exists because the old-media has failed; old media is not doing its job of reporting on Government without fear or favour. Denial of WikiLeaks as a Media organisation is hypocritical but protects this cosy arrangement.

7. WikiLeaks is presented in a completely negative light. Neither Government nor old-media will admit that WikiLeaks MAY have contributed to the drive for democracy in the middle-east because to do so would be an admission of both their failure and WikiLeaks success. I know WikiLeaks didn’t start the fire but one cannot doubt the fuel it provided. Machiavelli would be proud of this theft of credit. Denial of any positive contribution in the face of this failure is massively hypocritical.

8. Where’s the money. When Rudolf Elmer presented the Julius Baer DVD’s to Julian Assange at the Frontline Club one of the speakers, John Chistianson from a group called Tax Justice Network I think it was, stated that $20 trillion is held in off-shore tax havens. Why are those who have these illicit funds not being aggressively pursued? Surely these are the criminals, not Wikileaks or Julian Assange. Pursing the messenger while letting the criminal go free is also hypocritical.

In summary, I know there are many more points that could be made but it seems to me that the hypocrisy of HD Clinton is defensive; don’t allow the media-government collusion to be exposed, don’t allow the diplomatic failures to be exposed, and whatever else happens, at all costs do not allow transparency or the money will become visible. And if the latter happens, the people of the west who are under-employed, have had their houses repossed, do not have proper health care, see their education systems underfunded while all the time knowing-without-proof that the elite live a life of luxury, will rebel just like the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt did at these same revelations.